Starr Andrews remembers the stares she received in locker rooms at her earliest figure skating competitions. She remembers the requests to touch her coiled, textured hair.
“The first thing that popped into my mind is, ‘It’s because I’m Black,’” Andrews, 19, said in a recent interview. “And I wouldn’t want that to be the first thing that popped into my head, but I couldn’t help but think that.”
Andrews, the lone Black member of the U.S. national figure skating team, sometimes still encounters that unwelcome thought on and off the ice: that she might be seen as different from her peers in a sport she has loved since she was a little girl watching her mother take lessons.